‘Victory for Dee’: Warner found guilty of killing, hiding wife
- Mar 12
- 9 min read
By DAVID PANIAN
ADRIAN — A Tipton farmer and businessman was found guilty Tuesday of killing his wife and hiding her body almost five years ago.
The convictions of Dale Warner, 58, could be considered a change in the “Justice for Dee” movement to “Victory for Dee,” said Dee Ann Warner’s brother, Gregg Hardy.
Warner was found guilty of second-degree murder and tampering with evidence by a Lenawee County Circuit Court jury that heard 12 days of testimony about the injuries 52-year-old Dee Warner sustained that caused her death on the night of April 24-25, 2021, how in August 2024 police discovered her pajama-clad body welded inside an anhydrous ammonia tank, and the rocky marriage between the couple who owned farming and trucking businesses.
Dee Warner died from strangulation and blunt-force trauma to the face and head, according to the autopsy conducted by forensic pathologist Dr. Patrick Cho.
Jurors began deliberating at about 3:30 p.m. Thursday, March 5, and reached a verdict at about 4:30 p.m. Tuesday. They did not deliberate March 6 after one of them had an emergency. After having the weekend off and the court taking care of other business on Monday, they all returned to court Tuesday morning. The emergency that prevented the one juror from participating March 6 had been resolved and an alternate was not needed, Lenawee County Circuit Court Administrator Ciara McGrane said.
As the verdict was read shortly after 5:20 p.m. by Lenawee County Chief Deputy Clerk Phyllis Escott, Dee’s adult children quietly cried in the front row of the courtroom’s gallery. Dale Warner bowed his head a little and pursed his lips as his lead attorney, Mary Chartier, rested her left hand on his right shoulder.
Chartier asked that the jurors be polled, and one by one they each answered “yes” to the question of whether they agreed with the verdict.
Judge Michael R. Olsaver scheduled sentencing for May 7. Warner could be sentenced to up to life in prison on the second-degree murder charge. The maximum penalty for the evidence tampering charge is 10 years in prison and a $20,000 fine.
Olsaver thanked and dismissed the jury, and as the trial ended Warner was handcuffed and led away by sheriff’s deputies to be returned to the Lenawee County Jail where he has been incarcerated since being arrested in November 2023.
Final arguments
Under the open murder charge, the jurors can consider either first-degree or second-degree murder. First-degree murder involves premeditation. In her closing argument March 5, Lenawee County Prosecutor Jackie Wyse asked the jurors to find Warner guilty of first-degree murder.
“He had multiple chances to think about what he was doing,” she said.
In her rebuttal of Chartier’s closing argument, Wyse said Warner could have made a different decision, even after the alleged physical confrontation began.
After recounting the four blows to the head and how Dee Warner was strangled, Wyse asked, “How many chances did he get to think about what he was doing?”
Picking up a cellphone, Wyse continued, “Let’s assume three or four knocks her out, five, she’s unconscious. What do you do? Call for help, right? ‘I screwed up. I hurt my wife. Come help.’
“This defendant,” Wyse said, reaching for a roll of black duct tape like what was used to bind Dee’s body and then pulling out a length, “duct taped her mouth and her nose so that she could not breathe again. Those were all conscious decisions.”
Wyse took jurors back to 2019 to show how the Warners’ relationship deteriorated to the point on the weekend of April 24-25, 2021, that Dee told multiple people that she wanted to divorce Dale and sell the businesses. Her adult children and friends said they had never seen her so distraught.
Dale used technology to track Dee’s vehicles and took 90 photos of text messages on Dee’s phone with her son Zack, Wyse said. He enlisted his son-in-law to help with keeping tabs on Dee.
Wyse showed text messages that Dee sent to Dale in 2020 and 2021 where she told him she knew he was tracking and stalking her.
“I’m ready to move out and be done with this. You treat me as if I’m not worthy of anything. If you love something, you want everything for them. You do not,” Dee wrote Feb. 23, 2021, in a message to Dale.
Dee’s massage therapist, Stacey Brodie, testified about seeing bruises on Dee, including a hand-shaped bruise on one of Dee’s arms. During her appointment in the week before she disappeared, Dee was upset and talked about wanting to get a divorce.
On April 24, 2021, Dee received an angry text from the wife or girlfriend of one of her employees. In it, the woman mentioned Dee’s use of the anti-anxiety medication Xanax. This in particular upset Dee and led to her telling her daughters that she was going to confront Dale about getting a divorce and selling the businesses.
Wyse then set the stage for what investigators believe happened that night and the next day, April 25, by describing the layout of the farm, including the house, the old and new shops, the office, the spray or load barn, and the burn pile.
At 3:45 a.m., when trucking company employee Todd Neyrinck left the farm with a delivery, he saw Dee’s Hummer and Dale’s pickup parked behind the house. At 7 a.m., Warner is seen on the farm’s security video driving the front-end loader. Wyse said it was then that he drove up to the house and loaded Dee’s body into the loader’s bucket, but that isn’t captured on the security video. The farm’s cameras are aimed toward the barns, fuel tanks and truck scale, not the house.
At 7:08 a.m., data from General Motors showed the myCadillac app on Dale’s iPhone was used to unlock Dee’s Escalade where she kept her purse, Wyse said. At 7:14 a.m., Dee’s phone stopped communicating with cellphone towers.
A Michigan State Police cellphone specialist testified she used the signals recorded between Dee’s phone and two towers to the north and south of the Warner residence to determine where it was when it last connected to a tower. She said the data showed the phone was on the Warner farm and home property. Chartier said the analyst mistakenly used the north tower when the number of the tower that the phone connected to was to the east, implying the phone last connected somewhere to the east of the farm.
Wyse showed the jury a photo of the gun safe that was in the spray barn.
“He places her body inside there,” she said. “because he knows she’s not going to be found in there.
“Now this photograph, you look at that and that doesn’t do it justice.”
She then showed photos that Michigan State Police Detective/Lt. Daniel Drewyor, who is 6 feet 7 inches tall, took of himself sitting in a different safe, since the one that was in the spray barn has itself gone missing.
“What did Detective Drew-yor do? He found a similar safe. At the store. 30 seconds to remove the inserts. Six-foot-seven. That photograph shows you exactly how much room is inside that safe.”
Wyse listed inconsistencies in Dale’s statements, such as where Dee’s Hummer was parked and when it was moved from its usual parking spot behind the house over to the farm office. In an interview with Lenawee County Sheriff’s Detective Kevin Greca, Dale says Dee must have moved the Hummer. However, he also had said Dee was asleep on the living room couch at 7 a.m. when he returned to the house in the front-end loader, which he said he parked where the Hummer was. Wyse asked if the Hummer was parked there but Dee was sleeping, how could Dee have moved the Hummer so that Dale could park the front-end loader there.
“Those two things cannot be true at the same time,” she said.
Dale also had to get Dee’s body out of the house early, Wyse said, because he knew her daughter, her boyfriend and their kids would be coming over for breakfast.
Once police found Dee’s body and talked to an expert welder, they knew what to look for on the farm’s security video, Wyse said, providing a timeline of Dale’s activities on April 25 at the farm.
Chartier took issue with the prosecution’s timeline, going through a list of 110 points that she said established reasonable doubt. She said the health data from Dale’s Apple Watch and iPhone showed no movement overnight on April 24-25, and the police found through GPS data and talking with another farmer that Dale could have sprayed the fields he said he sprayed on April 25.
While Dale was seen with the angle grinder and at least one cutting or grinding disc, she said, there was no indication he took more than that and the prosecution’s welding expert said six to eight discs would’ve been needed to cut open the tank.
Dale also didn’t try to hide his activities on April 25, Chartier said. He knew that his employee Ivan Boyd and Boyd’s brother were in the old shop and that Dee’s adult children and other relatives were at the farm looking for her. He also knew there were cameras.
Dale returning to the farm to move a tank “that is similar to the tank that her body is found in, again, a very unique tank” during the police search on the evening of April 27 was suspicious, Wyse said.
The cover over the relief valve of the tank Dee’s body was in was different from others the Warners used, employees testified.
Neyrinck also testified that Dale would do small welding jobs if no one else was available. Chartier suggested that this was possibly why he was seen with welding items, since it was a Sunday and he had been out tilling.
“So if there’s a piece of equipment, a tilling tool, he said frequently broke down, it’s a Sunday, there aren’t many people there to do the welding, he wouldn’t be surprised if Mr. Warner did it,” Chartier said.
If Dale had to fix something by welding it, why not just take it to one of the shops where the welders were, Wyse countered. Instead, he took a welder to the spray barn where there are no cameras.
“He was absolutely hiding what he was welding when he took that to the spray barn,” she said.
A point of contention has been how Dale recommended against the police taking detection dogs into to the spray barn because of the chemicals on the floor. However, Chartier noted, Dale also asked if the police had boots for the dogs.
“If he’s trying to prevent them from going into the load barn, he’s not going to give them a solution as to how they can actually take the dogs in by putting boots on their feet,” she said.
There were other times in the investigation where Dale could have taken the investigators’ suggestions about what might have happened and used those to misdirect them but he didn’t, Chartier said.
Regarding accusations that Dale didn’t do enough to try to find Dee, Chartier said he was “not trying to make a splash in the public.”
“The government wants to present Mr. Warner as someone who did nothing, but that’s not true. He tried to offer assistance in the background,” she said, adding that he made suggestions to police about who to contact, asks Dee’s friend and assistant if she knew of anyone who might have picked up Dee, and wrote ideas of where she might be and aliases she might be using in a journal. “And he tried to keep his daughter’s life as stable as possible because her mother was missing.”
“These are the private actions of a man who wants his wife to come home,” she said.
If Dale was trying to hide anything, Chartier said, he would not have allowed Greca to spend time alone with his and Dee’s young daughter who could have shared what she saw of their relationship.
Chartier also suggested that some of the witnesses may have sought to present the case in a certain way.
“And it makes sense because they all loved Ms. Warner,” she said. “There’s no doubt about that. And, of course, they want to present her in the most favorable light and Mr. Warner in the least favorable light, but the facts matter, not assumptions.”
Juror emergency
The nature of the emergency the one juror experienced was not known, McGrane said Friday, but the court decided to send the other jurors home and resume deliberations on Tuesday. The court had a full docket of civil cases scheduled for Monday.
There were 16 jurors empaneled for the trial with four excused before deliberations began to reach the typical 12 who decide the verdict.
One of the four was excused by agreement of the prosecution and defense, McGrane said. No reason was given. The others were selected through a blind draw by Escott. Those three were called back on Friday so the court could see if they would be able to fill in if needed.
Having to call back alternate jurors once deliberations have begun has not happened in recent memory, McGrane said.
A concern was how much news or social media coverage of the case the alternates consumed or conversations they had with others about the case after being excused. Before breaks for lunch and at the end of each day during the trial, Olsaver read the jury an instruction to not follow any coverage of the trial because it could be incomplete or unfairly favor one side or the other. However, when the alternates were excused, they were no longer subject to that instruction because they were not expected to be called back.
The three alternates were questioned Friday by Olsaver and Chartier about their interactions with others and media reports on the case. Wyse declined to ask questions.
Two said they had seen some news reports and had conversations with family members about the case since being excused Thursday. One said he tried to pull up a video of the trial but all he saw was a logo. They said they had shared their opinions about the case and some of their relatives had shared their thoughts back to them. They all said they could continue to be fair and impartial, but they ultimately were not needed.
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